He just hoped that what she wanted was him.
Leith knew that he would stop yet again at Mrs.Bercine’s for the night.He imagined the wry look the woman would give him when she saw him back again.The wise innkeeper would know where he was going and smirk.She might even tell him that he was making the right choice.
The inn appeared and he was glad to see it.He was one step closer to Beatrice.Soon, but not soon enough, he would be back in Somerset.He stopped in front of the inn, already preparing to hand off his horse to the groom waiting near the entrance.
And then he saw her.
Beatrice.
He was sure he was hallucinating.
She was standing, looking up at the inn, so that he was confronted by her striking profile, almost ascetic in its severity, with her carefully plaited dark hair and high brow.From that angle, she looked as if she had been set in a stained-glass window.
He dismounted from his horse in a daze.
Given how much he had been yearning to reach her, to get back to Parkhorne Hall, he thought she must be a figment of his imagination.
Especially since she was dressed in the exact clothes she had been wearing when he met her.That unfashionable gown that he had thought so horrid—and which now he could only think made her look exquisitely beautiful.How addlepated he had been then, he reflected, not at pains to reach her, because she couldn’t be real, to think that such a stunning woman was unattractive because she wore an out-of-season dress.He couldn’t relate to the feelings of such a man, although that man had been him not long ago.
She turned and he expected her to disappear with the wind.
But, instead, their eyes met.
And he realized that she was very real indeed.
The Marquess of Leith felt his heart stutter and then stop completely.
She walked towards him, and he felt as if his blood had frozen solid in his veins.
It was Beatrice, his Beatrice, as fiery and beautiful as ever, her dark eyes roving over him with that intelligent vivacity that he had once found calculating.
What was she doing here?
He didn’t understand.
“Beatrice,” he croaked.“Why are you here?”
He realized now that she was crying.Tears leaked out of her eyes and down her face.He wanted to stop them with his fingers, to wipe them away with his lips.
“I was coming to find you,” she said.“In London.Why are you here?”
His throat tightened.His chest constricted.But he found the words.
“Coming to find you.In Somerset.”
She began to cry harder.
He stepped towards her.But she held up her hands.
“No.”
He stopped, utterly confused.
“I don’t deserve that.Not yet.Not after what I said to you.How I treated you.”
Leith shook his head.He didn’t care about the words that she had said when she was overwhelmed.He just wantedher.
But she seemed determined to speak.And he would let her, if that was what she needed.
